A cross-layer flooding strategy for wireless sensor networks

Flooding is a kind of broadcast technology in wireless sensor networks. And it is used in many occasions, such as routing, time synchronization and so on. But large-scale and intense flooding may cause broadcast storm, which aggravates the resource consumption in wireless sensor networks and leads to network congestion. In this paper, we propose a cross-layer flooding strategy for wireless sensor networks. The proposed flooding protocol makes use of the received signal power to decide the backoff time, which is an important parameter for medium access control, and thus reduces redundant broadcast packets and collisions. Analyses and simulations have shown that the new flooding protocol has much fewer redundant broadcast packets and can reduce energy consumption.